Dev Update #40: Learning To Podcast

This week has been another week of internal testing and tweaking, but we’ve already talked about that last week and the week before. Rather than sounding redundant, we thought it’d be best to tell you about something we’re learning about right now: the process of creating a podcast. This update will focus more on the performance aspect of a podcast, rather than the technical side, but let us know if you’re interested in hearing about that too!

For the past few weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out what we want our production to sound like. It’s possible that we aren’t popular enough to sustain ourselves simply by having a general discussion about whatever comes to mind. The natural alternative then would to keep conversation relatively focused on Gears of Eden. The real trick then was to figure out just how focused we wanted to be, and also how we wanted to structure the podcast. We considered having it be focused on news about Gears, but that’s the explicit purpose of the Dev Update. To go too hard in that direction would have both forms of content essentially competing for the same audience. It would be redundant, and we don’t want that; instead, we decided to loosen the reins a little to being more about what we’re thinking about as we work on Gears of Eden.

To accomplish this, we each typically try to bring three pieces of information to the recording session: what we’re working on, what’s inspiring us, and what we’re playing, and then we discuss it for roughly 30 minutes … or at least, we try to get 30 minutes worth of usable material out of it. See, the testing for the podcast has been carried about by three people: Sledge, Michael, and myself (Eric), and of the three of us, two are pretty introverted. We’re fine when just hanging out, but recording it? Putting it on the internet? Oof, that’ll trip us up. Just last week while recording a test, we got held up for a few minutes because one of us just couldn’t get through a complicated concept without stumbling over his stage fright. (It was me.) Rather than leave this awkwardness in, we decided to edit it, and other things like it, so that the final product could be a smoother listening experience, while also not running too long.

It’s worth it though! Not only do we think it’ll be good for Gears of Eden from an audience-building perspective, it also allows us to parse through our thoughts in a constructive way. On top of that, no matter how scary it is to know that strangers on the internet might listen to me talk about anything for their own entertainment, it’s genuinely fun! Our team gets along pretty well, and I’d rather put on a podcast with people like them than most anyone else.

It’s a process. It’s a process to figure out how to do a podcast, and its a process to figure out how we want ours to sound. We’ll be putting out the first episode soon and we hope you enjoy it! No doubt, you’ll find things you think we could be doing better, so be sure to let us know on Twitter of Facebook! That’s all for this week’s Dev Update, but we’ll be back next week and I hope to see you then. Thanks for reading!

@gearsofeden

About Us

We are a team of developers, artists, writers, thinkers, dreamers and gamers. We've banded together, volunteering our efforts to bring you a free demo version of Gears of Eden. We're hoping you'll enjoy our unique vision for this story and game, and that with your support, we will be able to grow our humble demo into the full-scale game we envision.